Method of verbal drawing. The power of persuasion: how to influence the audience through vivid verbal images? Inspiring images of the future

Verbal images that have merged with the soul and acquired value beyond their more narrow meaning, however, also have, so to speak, physical beauty when considered as a sound, as a melody. Understood even from the perspective of their most material essence, they are again not devoid of the ability to generate some hidden vibration of the auditory nerves, to cause some more general, little conscious emotional states, who are more than full expression gives tonal art. The words of language always live for both the poet and the reader as acoustic perceptions that have a known artistic influence. And no matter how the theory of poetry as the art of visible images underestimates this significance of the sensual, auditory, tonal, poets still instinctively grasp that it is very important point poetic influence, so that if some take care at least to avoid visible disharmony between sound expression and content, others may, by innate inclination or consciously, place the burden of just such harmony at the expense of everything pictorial or intellectual that affects the imagination and mind .

Characteristic in this regard is the reaction against Lessing's principle, which occurred very early in the circles of German and English romantics and was later picked up by French neo-romantics or symbolists. We have already indicated, speaking about the creative mood, what kind of performance Novalis or Tick associate with lyrical excitement, what they consider musical element more important than the thought itself that is expressed. Such poets as Keathe and Tennyson in England, probably proceeding from a sense of the musical mood that precedes the formalized idea and the individual word in the process of creation, want to completely consciously ignore certain meaning and paintings to suggest experiences through simple sound, through sound impressions “maximum of sound” and “minimum of sense”, is the most obvious feature of this entire trend in English literature after 1830. Many of Tennyson’s poems are striking in their vacuity, their “minimum meaning,” while great place They are occupied by sound painting - “maximum melodies.” Musical-sound combinations, a rich development of everything externally formal, be it a combination of vowels and consonants or a rhythmic-strophic structure, are used not only to help internal movements that are more elusive to the mind, but also as a means of conveying objectively visual, accessible to perception. The rhythm and music of the verse want to enchant the ear, reminiscent of the beat of horse hooves and the roar of shells (in the poem “Light Cavalry”), or recalling the visual picture with brilliant assonances and alliterations (in the poem “Stream”), or painting with the sounds of the ringing of a Christmas bell: “Peace and kindness, kindness and peace, peace and kindness for all mankind."

Later, thanks to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, this direction was musical poetry turns into modern symbolism, which finds expression in the works of Yates and Wilde, which can be placed next to such French poets, like Verlaine, Samen and Greg, and with the Germans - Stefan George and Hofmannsthal.

In France, precisely as a reaction against the plastic and pictorial poetry of the Parnassian school, which gave exemplary works in the persons of Heredia and François Copé and led verse to possible technical perfection after Hugo, a tendency towards illogical poetry appeared, where image and idea are nothing, and sound is everything. Verlaine, Malarme and others discovered in language new tool, through which, in addition to the imagination, they acted directly on the soul. Equally disgusted by the academic coldness of the Parnassians and the prosaic and formless nature of the naturalists, who saw only visible reality or crude passions and instincts, the Symbolists turned to the most subtle moods, to the mysteries of the soul, striving to create musical poetry. Through skillfully selected sounds and through freely dissected verse, vers libre, which does not recognize the old monotonous architectonics and allows at every step the so-called enjambement, poets, followers of Verlaine, turned the word almost into an end in itself, got lost in the dark play of words and went to extremes , a new formalism that bordered on tasteless mannerism. Their main goal was to impose the principle “Ut musica ut poesis”, to convince readers that in poetry, as the first verse of Verlaine’s new “Poetics” declares:

This direction in lyricism was also significantly influenced by Baudelaire, to whom the Symbolists returned with delight as their true teacher. Malarmé adapts his aesthetic to Baudelaire's sonnet “Correspondences” (“Smells, flowers and sounds respond to each other”); Verlaine professes real fanaticism in relation to the one from whom, due to spiritual kinship, he borrows the titles of his “Saturn Poems” and “Cursed Poets”; Arthur Rimbaud extracts his lyrical stanza and elements of The Alchemy of Verse from The Flowers of Evil. Baudelaire's verse showed extraordinary musical and rhythmic qualities and fully corresponded to its author's theory of a “mysterious prosody” that “took deeper roots in the soul than classical poetry suspected” and allows a poetic phrase to imitate one or another line (straight, curved, steep, zigzag, spiral, parabola), thus approaching music again. This school of poetry was also influenced by the works of Wagner, which combined music with poetry and was greeted with enthusiasm by all gifted writers. I immediately felt how poor the language is for expressing affective and general inner life and how music almost directly affects the central nervous system, creating all the desired illusions, all phantasmagoria. “For poets, the need inevitably arose,” notes Valery, a student of symbolism, “to oppose something to a dangerous rival, the owner of such deceptive and strong excitement for human soul". Wasn’t even painting in 1885 looking for some kind of relationship with music in order to increase its power of suggestion through it? Hence the consciousness among the Symbolists that it is necessary to put into poetry something of the secrets of tones in order to achieve from language effects similar to those produced by purely sonorous factors.

It turns out that one must not think, but listen to the verse, since the words themselves, beyond their abstract meaning, can speak to feelings. Moreover, some fans of musical verse believed that with the help sound painting it is even possible to create ideas, and Banville, for example, tries to awaken the idea of ​​the comic “through harmonies, through the influence of words, through the almighty magic of rhyme.” Banville himself is not a symbolist, but this is undoubtedly the path of symbolism that he would have followed if the rational elements in his poetry, the logical and the plastic, had not occupied as much space as the musical-rhythmic ones. In this regard, Verlaine, the forerunner of the Symbolists, shows incomparably more common sense and in understanding the possibilities of poetry than such a German lyricist as Rilke, for example, who constructs descriptions of landscapes and even dramatic scenes with the help of purely acoustic elements. The difficulties here, in connecting sensations from different areas, due to the basic emotional tone, are as great as in music, which causes the most definite pictorial effects. U Chinese philosopher Le Tzu tells the story of a musician who, playing the zither and imagining climbing high mountains or the noise of a stream, evoked similar impressions in its listeners. In a gloomy mood while traveling in rainy times, this musician again conveyed the corresponding feelings and ideas. And at the end he said to his companion: “You hear perfectly well what is in my soul. The pictures you evoke are the same as my mood. It is impossible for me to hide with my tones." In poetry, this evocative power of tones and sounds should be understood very conditionally. Through the special coloring of vowels or consonants, through their shine or their dark color and weak articulation, it is truly possible to significantly clarify the ideas about the things directly depicted; but to think that this is enough to neglect any participation of the imagination means to completely shift the center of gravity in poetic art.

The Russian symbolic school also came out in defense of the new principle, since in it, of course, we have serious poets, and not mediocre followers of everything fashionable. Andrei Bely argues this way:

“To deny verbal art the play with words as with sounds, or to belittle the significance of this play, means to look at a living language as a dead, unnecessary whole that has completed the circle of its development: there is a whole class of people whose hearing has been castrated by bad upbringing and false views on language and who consider the refinement of verbal instrumentation an idle exercise: unfortunately, among art critics the majority are castrates of hearing... Meanwhile, the ability to aesthetically enjoy not only a figurative image, but also the very sound of a word, regardless of its content, is extremely developed among word artists.”

And, emphasizing how few observations have yet been made in the nature of verbal instrumentation, and in particular about alliteration and assonance, which are only the surface of deeper melodic phenomena, Bely adds: “We only vaguely sense that the work true artist words are able to excite our ear by the very selection of sounds and that there is an as yet elusive parallel between the content of the experience and the sound material of the words that shapes it.”

Along the way, we should note that not only artistic word, but ordinary speech also knows this relationship between sounds and symbolic meaning, So famous words inherent already because of a certain sound combination and in addition to any basic meaning, this or that tendency. But systematic observations in this direction have not yet been made.

Quoting Baratynsky's poem:

Look: young freshness.

And in the autumn of years she captivates,

And she has a gray-haired flyer.

Doesn't steal lanit roses:

He himself is defeated by beauty.

He looks and does not continue his path,

White notes:

“... carefully analyzing line by line, we begin to understand that the entire poem is built on “e” and “a”, first comes “e”, then “a”: the decisiveness and cheerfulness of the final words seem to be connected with the open sound “a” ... Alliteration and assonance are hidden here... And that there is a series of alliterations here, we will be convinced if we emphasize the alliterative sounds... Here (in first three lines) three groups of alliterations:

1) on “l”, 2) on nasal sounds (m, n), 3) on dental sounds (d, t), i.e. for 12 not clearly alliterating letters there are 23 clearly alliterating ones (twice as many).”

And, quoting another poem by the same Baratynsky, beginning with the lines:

The lure of affectionate speeches.

You can't make me crazy...

Bely explains: “As it develops, the melancholic tone of the poem turns into a tone of gloomy determination and anger, and accordingly melancholic instrumentation ( mnl) changes: like pipes, teeth enter and through h switch to whistling in a line that is sarcastic in meaning:

We have cited these opinions and observations as well as reproaches to critics who look only for social moods and ideas in poetry and who have “the fear of loving the very flesh of the expression of the artist’s thoughts: words, a combination of words,” since only this way explains the new extreme to which supporters reach musical painting, who do not recognize the plot, ideas and pictures in poetry and reduce verbal art to a risky play of sounds and vague images, to a set of words that mean nothing, but pretend to be a reflection of internal rhythms or symbols of innermost moods. One or two typical poems of symbolism will convince us of what great violence they sometimes allow themselves to the word, forcing it to say things that it cannot say, and to feel how premeditation and mannerism vainly strive to take on the role of artistic instinct. Verlaine's strange "Twilight of a Mystical Evening" reads: where there is a lot of onomatopoeia and sonorous words, but little meaning. The author completely deviates from the normal poetic way of speaking, as well as from generally accepted spelling, throwing out, following the example of Malarme, both the main letters and the system of punctuation marks. These examples of poetic music reduced to dangerous wordplay, programs verbal art, ignoring everything logical and clearly stated in favor of acoustic effects, and the latter do not have the universality and regularity that is inherent in rhythms and sounds instinctively found in a creative mood. Therefore, the understanding of this kind of symbolism is limited to a very narrow circle of amateurs, and the art of such poets as Gheorghe and his followers will never, with its one-sided formalism and its esoteric inspirations, acquire the influence and significance of older literary movements. Achieving a strict stylization of the contemplated and a noble distance from everything temporary and everyday, everything that is morality and worldview, the inspirer of the poets grouped around the magazine “Blätter für die Kunst” (1892-1919), the enemy of the naturalists and romantics of the Heine school, supports the principle: “ Poems should be inexplicable, their purpose is to awaken feelings and make the inexpressible sound.” But a certain coldness and some kind of sought-after and dark impressionism leave us indifferent to this music of the inexpressible in the soul. Hofmannsthal also cannot cover up with his tonal word game the ideological emptiness of his lyrics. Much more natural and naively mystical in comparison with him and George is their contemporary R. M. Rilke, likewise a fan of the music of words, exquisite rhyme and assonance, who professes: “Ich bin eine Saite, über breite Resonanzen gespannt.” (“I am a taut string with a wide resonance.”) Gheorghe’s merit lies only in what he gives with his “hieratic art” - this poetic cursive writing, where the original image of writing is barely perceptible - a rebuff to the modern lyrical routine, using long-unsuitable means.

Psychology literary creativity Arnaudov Mikhail

4. SOUND PAINTING AND SYMBOLICS

4. SOUND PAINTING AND SYMBOLICS

Verbal images, fused with the soul and acquired value beyond their narrower meaning, however, also have, so to speak, physical beauty when considered as sound, as melody. Understood even from the side of their most material essence, they are again not devoid of the ability to generate some hidden vibration of the auditory nerves, to evoke some more general, little-conscious emotional states, to which tonal art gives a more complete expression. The words of a language always live for both the poet and the reader as acoustic perceptions that have a certain artistic influence. And no matter how much the theory of poetry as the art of visible images underestimates this significance of the sensual, auditory, tonal, poets still instinctively grasp that it is a very important moment of poetic influence, so that if some care at least about avoiding visible disharmony between sound expression and content, others may, by innate inclination or consciously, place the weight on just such harmony at the expense of everything pictorial or intellectual that affects the imagination and mind.

Characteristic in this regard is the reaction against Lessing's principle, which occurred very early in the circles of German and English romantics and was later picked up by French neo-romantics or symbolists. We have already indicated, speaking about the creative mood, what kind of idea Novalis or Tieck associate with lyrical excitement, that they consider the musical element to be more important than the thought itself that is expressed. Poets such as Keathe and Tennyson in England, probably proceeding from a sense of the musical mood that precedes the formed idea and the individual word in the process of creation, want to completely consciously ignore certain meanings and pictures in order to suggest an experience through simple sound, through sound impressions “maximum.” sound" ("maximum of sound") and "minimum of sense" ("minimum of sense"), is the most obvious feature of this entire trend in English literature after 1830. Many of Tennyson's poems are striking in their vacuity, their "minimum of meaning", whereas a large place in them is occupied by sound painting - “maximum melodies.” Musical-sound combinations, a rich development of everything externally formal, be it a combination of vowels and consonants or a rhythmic-strophic structure, are used not only to help internal movements that are more elusive to the mind, but also as a means of conveying objectively visual, accessible to perception. The rhythm and music of the verse want to enchant the ear, reminiscent of the beat of horse hooves and the roar of shells (in the poem “Light Cavalry”), or recalling the visual picture with brilliant assonances and alliterations (in the poem “Stream”), or painting with the sounds of the ringing of a Christmas bell: “Peace and kindness, kindness and peace, peace and kindness for all mankind."

Later, thanks to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, this trend in musical poetry turns into modern symbolism, expressed in the works of Yates and Wilde, which can be placed next to such French poets as Verlaine, Samen and Greg, and with German ones - Stefan George and Hofmannsthal.

In France, precisely as a reaction against the plastic and pictorial poetry of the Parnassian school, which gave exemplary works in the person of Heredia and Francois Copé and led verse to possible technical perfection after Hugo, a tendency towards illogical poetry appeared, where the image and idea are nothing, and sound is everything. Verlaine, Malarme and others discovered a new tool in language, through which, in addition to the imagination, they acted directly on the soul. Equally disgusted by the academic coldness of the Parnassians and the prosaic and formless nature of the naturalists, who saw only visible reality or crude passions and instincts, the Symbolists turned to the most subtle moods, to the mysteries of the soul, striving to create musical poetry. Through skillfully selected sounds and through freely dissected verse, vers libre, which does not recognize the old monotonous architectonics and allows at every step the so-called enjambement, poets, followers of Verlaine, turned the word almost into an end in itself, got lost in the dark play of words and went to extremes , a new formalism that bordered on tasteless mannerism. Their main goal was to impose the principle “Ut musica ut poesis”, to convince readers that in poetry, as the first verse of Verlaine’s new “Poetics” declares:

"Music First"

This direction in lyricism was also significantly influenced by Baudelaire, to whom the Symbolists returned with delight as their true teacher. Malarmé adapts his aesthetic to Baudelaire's sonnet “Correspondences” (“Smells, flowers and sounds respond to each other”); Verlaine professes real fanaticism in relation to the one from whom, due to spiritual kinship, he borrows the titles of his “Saturn Poems” and “Cursed Poets”; Arthur Rimbaud extracts his lyrical stanza and elements of The Alchemy of Verse from The Flowers of Evil. Baudelaire's verse showed extraordinary musical and rhythmic qualities and fully corresponded to its author's theory of a “mysterious prosody” that “took deeper roots in the soul than classical poetry suspected” and allows a poetic phrase to imitate one or another line (straight, curved, steep, zigzag, spiral, parabola), thus approaching music again. This school of poetry was also influenced by the works of Wagner, which combined music with poetry and was greeted with enthusiasm by all gifted writers. I immediately felt how poor language is for expressing affective and inner life in general, and how music almost directly affects the central nervous system, creating all the desired illusions, all phantasmagoria. “For poets, the need inevitably arose,” notes Valery, a student of symbolism, “to oppose something to a dangerous rival, the owner of such deceptive and strong excitement for the human soul.” Wasn’t even painting in 1885 looking for some kind of relationship with music in order to increase its power of suggestion through it? Hence the consciousness among the Symbolists that it is necessary to put into poetry something of the secrets of tones in order to achieve from language effects similar to those produced by purely sonorous factors.

It turns out that one must not think, but listen to the verse, since the words themselves, beyond their abstract meaning, can speak to feelings. Moreover, some fans of musical verse believed that with the help of sound painting it was possible to create even ideas, and Banville, for example, tries to awaken the idea of ​​\u200b\u200bthe comic “through consonances, through the influence of words, through the almighty magic of rhyme.” Banville himself is not a symbolist, but this is undoubtedly the path of symbolism that he would have followed if the rational elements in his poetry, the logical and the plastic, had not occupied as much space as the musical-rhythmic ones. In this respect, Verlaine, the forerunner of the Symbolists, shows incomparably more common sense in understanding the possibilities of poetry than such a German lyricist as Rilke, for example, who constructs descriptions of landscapes and even dramatic scenes using purely acoustic elements. The difficulties here, in connecting sensations from different areas, due to the basic emotional tone, are as great as in music, which causes the most definite pictorial effects. The Chinese philosopher Le Tzu tells the story of a musician who, playing the zither and imagining climbing high mountains or the sound of a stream, evoked similar impressions in his listeners. In a gloomy mood while traveling in rainy times, this musician again conveyed the corresponding feelings and ideas. And at the end he said to his companion: “You hear perfectly well what is in my soul. The pictures you evoke are the same as my mood. It is impossible for me to hide with my tones.” In poetry, this evocative power of tones and sounds should be understood very conditionally. Through the special coloring of vowels or consonants, through their shine or their dark color and weak articulation, it is truly possible to significantly clarify the ideas about the things directly depicted; but to think that this is enough to neglect any participation of the imagination means to completely shift the center of gravity in poetic art.

The Russian symbolic school also came out in defense of the new principle, since in it, of course, we have serious poets, and not mediocre followers of everything fashionable. Andrei Bely argues this way:

“To deny verbal art the play with words as with sounds, or to belittle the significance of this play, means to look at a living language as a dead, unnecessary whole that has completed the circle of its development: there is a whole category of people whose hearing has been castrated by bad upbringing and false views on language and who consider the sophistication of verbal instrumentation to be an idle occupation: unfortunately, among art critics, the majority are castrati of hearing... Meanwhile, the ability to aesthetically enjoy not only a figurative image, but also the very sound of a word, regardless of its content, is extremely developed among word artists.”

And, emphasizing how few observations have yet been made in the nature of verbal instrumentation, and in particular about alliteration and assonance, which are only the surface of deeper melodic phenomena, Bely adds: “We only vaguely sense that the work of a true artist of words is capable of exciting our ear by itself.” selection of sounds and that there is a still elusive parallel between the content of the experience and the sound material of the words that shapes it.”

Along the way, we should note that not only the literary word, but also ordinary speech knows this relationship between sounds and symbolic meaning, so that certain words are inherent already because of a certain sound combination and in addition to any basic meaning, this or that tendency. But systematic observations in this direction have not yet been made.

Quoting Baratynsky's poem:

Take a look: youthful freshness

And in the autumn of years she captivates,

And she has a gray flyer

Doesn't steal lanit roses:

Himself defeated by beauty

He looks and the path does not continue,

White notes:

“... carefully analyzing line by line, we begin to understand that the entire poem is built on “e” and “a”, first comes “e”, then “a”: the decisiveness and cheerfulness of the final words seem to be connected with the open sound “a” ... Alliteration and assonance are hidden here... And that there is a series of alliterations here, we will be convinced if we emphasize the alliterating sounds... There are three groups of alliterations here (in the first three lines):

1) on “l”, 2) on nasal sounds (m, n), 3) on dental sounds (d, t), i.e. for 12 not clearly alliterating letters there are 23 clearly alliterating ones (twice as many).”

And, quoting another poem by the same Baratynsky, beginning with the lines:

The lure of kind words

You can't make me crazy...

Bely explains: “As it develops, the melancholic tone of the poem turns into a tone of gloomy determination and anger, and accordingly melancholic instrumentation ( mnl) changes: like pipes, teeth enter and through h switch to whistling in a line that is sarcastic in meaning:

I don’t dare compete.”

We have cited these opinions and observations as well as reproaches to critics who look only for social moods and ideas in poetry and who have “the fear of loving the very flesh of the expression of the artist’s thoughts: words, a combination of words,” since only this way explains the new extreme to which come supporters of musical painting who do not recognize the plot, ideas and pictures in poetry and reduce verbal art to a risky play of sounds and vague images, to a set of words that mean nothing, but pretend to be a reflection of internal rhythms or symbols of innermost moods. One or two typical poems of symbolism will convince us of what great violence they sometimes allow themselves to the word, forcing it to say things that it cannot say, and to feel how premeditation and mannerism vainly strive to take on the role of artistic instinct. Verlaine's strange "Twilight of a Mystical Evening" reads:

Twilight trembles... Memories tremble

In the shining distance of former hope,

Blushing in the fire of flickering rays.

A strange curtain, now brighter, now paler

Living combinations burn in the heavens

Weaved into a pattern by the play of their lights

And the poison of the sultry, corruptive breath -

Tulips, dahlias, roses, ranunculus, orchids, -

My thoughts are clouded by the impulses of all passions

And in general fainting drained unconsciously

And this twilight, and all the memories.

And the greatest admirers of Verlaine must admit that the meaning here is difficult to guess, although there are so many charms for the ear. And it is so difficult to grasp anything primary and sincerely felt in George’s overpraised poem “Sleep and Death,” where there is a lot of onomatopoeia and sonorous words, but little meaning. The author completely deviates from the normal poetic way of speaking, as well as from generally accepted spelling, throwing out, following the example of Malarme, both the main letters and the system of punctuation marks. These are examples of poetic music reduced to a dangerous play with words, a program of verbal art that ignores everything logical and clearly stated in favor of acoustic effects, the latter not having the universality and regularity that is inherent in rhythms and sounds instinctively found in a creative mood. Therefore, the understanding of this kind of symbolism is limited to a very narrow circle of amateurs, and the art of such poets as Gheorghe and his followers will never, with its one-sided formalism and its esoteric inspirations, acquire the influence and significance of older literary movements. Achieving a strict stylization of the contemplated and a noble distance from everything temporary and everyday, everything that is morality and worldview, the inspirer of the poets grouped around the magazine “Blätter für die Kunst” (1892-1919), the enemy of the naturalists and romantics of the Heine school, supports the principle: “Poems should be inexplicable, their purpose is to awaken feelings and make the inexpressible sound.” But a certain coldness and some kind of sought-after and dark impressionism leave us indifferent to this music of the inexpressible in the soul. Hofmannsthal also cannot cover up the ideological emptiness of his lyrics with his tonal verbal play. Much more natural and naively mystical in comparison with him and George is their contemporary R. M. Rilke, likewise a fan of the music of words, exquisite rhyme and assonance, who professes: “Ich bin eine Saite, ?ber breite Resonanzen gespannt.” (“I am a stretched string with a wide resonance.”) Gheorghe’s merit lies only in what he gives with his “hieratic art” - this poetic cursive writing, where the original image of writing is barely perceptible - a rebuff to the modern lyrical routine, using long-unsuitable means.